Another boy, a certain Man..., a peasant from the Val d'Aosta, an Alpine valley in Piedmont, where cretinism is indigenous, exhibited perverse tendencies from his earliest infancy. When twelve years old, he killed his companion in a squabble over an egg. (See Fig. 13.) In the above-mentioned cases, the subjects all belonged to well-to-do or honest families and the pathological heredity was therefore exclusively nervous, not criminal. For this reason, the parents were struck by the abnormal depravity of their sons and had them medically examined and treated, thus discovering that they were morally insane. If, on the other hand, the parents had been criminals and had, themselves, set a bad example, nobody would have supposed that these depraved tendencies were innate in the children or had developed precociously. The fact of the prevalence of moral insanity in neurotic families (with frequent cases of lunacy, alcoholism, etc.) rather than in those of criminal tendencies appears at first sight strange, but according to the new theory advanced by my father, the criminal is a mentally diseased person; and we shall see in a later chapter that the heredity of insane, neurotic, and dipsomaniac parents is completely equivalent to a criminal heredity. =FIG. 12 BOY MORALLY INSANE (see page 55)= =FIG. 13 BOY MORALLY INSANE (see page 56)= _Proofs of Analogy._ Thus the genesis and early manifestations, which might have been diverse, really constitute a counter-proof. Careful anamnesis shows that both born criminals and the morally insane begin at a very early age to exhibit symptoms of the morbid tendencies which make them such a danger to society, and if the general public and the police, when such cases are brought to their notice, usually fail to realise that they arise from precocious perversity, it is because atrocious actions are excused on the ground of extreme youth and attributed to this cause rather than to vicious propensities. In many cases, indeed, they are revealed only to the physician. A counter-proof is likewise furnished by investigations of the origin of these pathological cases, since the study of born criminals shows that they, as well as the morally insane, are as frequently the offspring of insane, epileptic, neurotic, and drunken parents as of criminals, but in the latter case, the morbid origin of their perversity is seldom brought to light owing to the criminality of the parents, who naturally view with indifference symptoms of vice in their children. EPILEPTICS, AND THEIR RELATION TO BORN CRIMINALS AND THE MORALLY INSANE We have already stated that the physical and psychic characteristics of born criminals coincide with those of the morally insane. Both are identical with those of another class of degenerates, known to the world as epileptics.